Visual and Vocal Image

Visual Image vs. Vocal Image

• Visual image includes dress and body language.
• It forms initial assumptions about a person's confidence, professionalism, and warmth.
• Vocal image relates to the voice and forms beliefs about a person's success, credibility, friendliness, and trustworthiness.
• Society tends to ignore vocal image, despite its importance.

Vocal Mastery

• Changing the way one speaks is possible because it involves changing behaviors.
• Vocal image can be styled to build trust, rapport, connection, and influence.
• The voice should be seen as an instrument.

Vocal Foundations

• Vocal foundations include rate of speech, volume, pitch and melody, tonality, and the pause.
• Using these foundations might feel unfamiliar but not fake.
• It's important to explore the full range of one's vocal capabilities.

Rate of Speech

• Varying rate of speech with purpose is more engaging.
• Slow down the rate of speech to highlight important information.
• Speed up the rate of speech for less important information.

Volume

• Volume gives life to every other vocal foundation.
• Using a volume of 6 to 7 out of 10 can make one appear more confident and authoritative.
• Strong volume demonstrates vitality and belief in what one is saying.
• Varying the volume is important, drawing people by speaking quietly or pushing a point by speaking loudly.

Pitch and Melody

• Pitch and melody are the different notes one can hit.
• Avoid a monotonous melody in communication.
• Siren technique is a simple exercise to expand the vocal range.

Tonality

• Tonality is the emotion underneath one's voice.
• Six core human emotions are happy, sad, disgust, angry, surprise, and fearful.
• Facial expressions are the remote control to inject emotion into one's voice.
• Nervousness can cause a blank face, resulting in no emotion in the voice.
• One should move one's face when they speak to move people.

Pause

• Pause gives people time to process what has been said
• The use of pauses can reduce filler words and non-words.
• Removing filler words and non-words increases clarity, authority, and credibility.

Disliking Your Own Voice

• People dislike the sound of their voice because how they sound to themselves is not how they sound to others.
• Hearing one's voice through bone vibrations makes it sound deeper, while recordings capture airwave vibrations.
• Time is required to become more comfortable with the sound of your own voice.
• You can become comfortable with the sound of your own voice through continuous desensitization
• By listening to your own voice a lot, the sound you hear internally and the one captured on recordings starts to merge.
• In a video, that's how you look and sound
• Focus on the vocal foundations and body language when listening to your students or recordings.

Speaking Slowly

• Speaking slowly can be due to software or hardware issues.
• Software issues could be when English is a second language, leading to thinking in a different language first and then translating.
• It can be hard to keep up if someone is thinking in another language and then translating to English
• To improve, one needs to speak English more than their mother tongue to start thinking in English.
• Hardware issues can be due to the mouth not being able to keep up with quick thoughts.
• Remedy the hardware issue by practicing moving the lips more, faster, and doing tongue twisters.

Nerves While Public Speaking

• The biggest fear is going blank so people should rehearse properly
• Rehearsal is critical; a table read involves reading it as if presenting to an audience.
• Worry less about what people think because they are often thinking about themselves
• It is not about you on stage, you are there to serve

Engaging People Online

• Proxemic is the study of distances, therefore avoid being too close to the laptop
• A speaker should present in the social space which ranges from top of head to waist on screen
• Eye contact online should be mainly with the camera.
• If you want online viewers to engage with you move dynamically and use the space in the screen to full effect

Being Witty

• Witty mixes speed, intelligence, and humor.
• Only 20% of the time is someone spontaneously witty, 80% of the time they're prepared.
• Key elements include timing, intellect, and risk.
• Humor requires a benign violation.
• Bengine = not violent
• The key is to be able to assess the moment, and improve with good situational awareness
• If wit is attempted and fails, one should accept it and move on without dwelling on it.
• Develop wit by trusting yourself, trying, and reflecting to analyze why it worked or didn't.

How to Be Like Me

• You should be like you
• To find you one must find the right mix
• Great chefs pick 5 chefs and imitate them, and then you add in your own ingredients and chilli
• List the ingredients of the 5 chefs and copy them
• Then copy again and stick to the formula

How to Encourage Your Staff to Come Out of Their Shell

• Improv classes work to break out of comfort zones,
• In improv classes, the environment is a safe one where no one has any preconceived ideas of who you are

How to Be a Brilliant Public Speaker

• Three tips you would give are to record and review, and repeat
• Leave it for a day before review
• Review the auditory, visual and transcribed component seperately
• The video should be improvised and unrehearsed for 5 minutes